This Veggie Burger Gushes Blood Because Science Is Magic – PHOTO

Here's something we didn't know we needed but totally do: A veggie burger (comprised totally of, you know, veggies) that looks, tastes, and bleeds – BLEEDS – just like a regular burger, which, in case you didn't know, traditionally comes from a dead cow, or a bison, or an ostrich, depending on how fancy of a burger eatery you're at. A professor at Stanford University came up with this little monstrosity with an assist from his team at Impossible Foods. Things I don't want my food to ever be: Impossible. The secret to making this burger spit forth vampire-enticing juices is a molecule called "heme," which is found in the hemoglobin of both plants and animals. Let us all pause to briefly imagine a vampire sucking tenderly upon a tulip.

Science aside, let us discuss how this is ridiculous. In order to best illustrate this, I shall now use sarcasm: Yeah, because eeeeeverybody knows that the one thing that vegetarians miss desperately about the meat-eating life is the way a not-quite-thoroughly-prepared slab of beast-animal gushes forth with the fluids that once assisted in giving it life. But now not one animal need be led to the slaughter in order for you to pretend that you are a lion prowling the wilds of the African plains. Ah, science. You sassy beast. Although, to be fair, some people do like bloody meat, so maybe there is an audience here.

From a "hey cool" perspective — yeah, this is pretty cool. It's cool in the way that you can use the powers of food science to make an apple pie out of Ritz crackers using no apples and trick people into thinking they are eating fruit instead of straight-up butter, sugar, flour, more butter, more sugar, more flour and also deceit. Hey, whatever it takes to get people to eat veggies, right?